CHAPTER IX. 



NEW ZEALAND AND NEIGHBOURING ARCHIPELAGOES. 



HE insular home of the Maori race, which penetrates southwards in 

 the direction of the Antarctic waters, has preserved the name 

 bestowed upon it by its Dutch discoverer. Although the most 

 English of all the Australasian colonies, and often called the 

 " Great Britain of the Antipodes," New Zealand thus still recalls 

 the memory of the great navigator Abel Tasman, who sighted its western shores 

 in 1642, and who at first named it Staaten Land, in the belief that it might 

 possibly be continuous with the other so-named Dutch territory lying to the 

 south of America. In consequence of a sanguinary encounter with the natives of 

 Massacre Bay at the north-west side of the southern island, Tasman continued his 

 northerly course to the extreme headland of the Archipelago without determining 

 the insular character of the lands discovered by him. 



This region was not again visited till the year 1769, when Cook touched first 

 at an inlet on the east coast of the northern island, to which he gave the name of 

 Poverty Bay, a name, however, now belied by the magnificent flocks of the surround- 

 ing pastoral district. Cook then coasted the seaboard in a southerly direction, and 

 by circumnavigating the whole group showed that it formed no part of the 

 Austral continent which he had hoped to have at last discovered. He again 

 visited these waters on each of his two subsequent voyages, and altogether passed 

 327 days in surveying the archipelago, the chart of which, prepared by him, is 

 remarkable for its surprising accuracy, even in details. Henceforth, nothing 

 remained to be done beyond following the sinuosities of the coast-line and explor- 

 ing the interior of the islands. The very year of its re-discovery by Cook, the 

 French navigator Surville landed on the northern island, the shores of which 

 were studied three years later by Marion and Crozet. Marion, with fourteen of 

 his men, was here massacred by the natives, and after this period the whalers 

 began to visit the New Zealand waters, without, however, founding any permanent 

 settlements on the seaboard. 



The earliest attempts at colonisation were due to the enterprise of Australian 

 immigrants. A missionary station founded at Pahia, on the shores of the Bay of 

 Islands, near the northern extremity of the archipelago, was soon followed by a 

 settlement of fishers and traders, which sprang up at Kororarika over against 



